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City of Port Coquitlam moves to cloud-based ERP

15th June 2015

Unit4 a provider of enterprise applications for service organizations, has announced that the City of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia has gone live with its cloud implementation of Unit4 Business World ERP.

Unit4 say they are the first enterprise software provider to host Canadian municipal data in the cloud. Unit4 deployed an IBM SoftLayer® bare metal and virtual server infrastructure to support Canadian organizations with legislated local data residency requirements.

“With the technology industry moving in this direction, the City of Port Coquitlam identified potential for cost savings, increases in full-service and support, and greater access to delivery specialists beyond what we could resource internally, as key cloud advantages,” says Robin Wishart, the City’s Director of Corporate Support. “Jurisdictions in British Columbia are legislatively required to keep all personal information in a Canadian data center, including employee and payroll data, as well as constituents or taxpayer information. Unit4 has a secure, Canadian data center hosted by IBM, enabling personal information on the cloud. This is a new development available to Canadian municipalities and we are pleased to be an early adopter.”

Wishart says that when assessing the Unit4 cloud offering, he factored in technology, functionality, cost implications and in-house resources. His research included security, which he found to be far superior as the data center has a team of highly skilled specialists in all areas of technology security.

“Having the ability to host public data in the cloud is a game changer,” says Scott Kamieneski, SVP and Managing Director of Unit4 in North America. “Port Coquitlam’s cloud adoption marks a significant change for public sector IT in Canada. Unit4 is proud to have a formal relationship with IBM on this initiative, and excited to work with our public sector customers to bring them affordable and secure cloud deployment without sacrificing functionality.”